Teaching is hard, but France is perfect!

Bonjour bonjour!

Thanks for all your wonderful comments. It’s so nice to know there are people at home actually reading this!

Once again I feel like I can barely describe how wonderful things are, I feel so lucky. I am settled into my apartment (and managed to hit up a rockin’ home décor store sale to get some home-y touches) and also started teaching full time. I can fully say I had no idea how hard teaching would be, despite the fact that my mother is a teacher. I had no idea! Kids never sit still and they’re ALWAYS talking. I had five kids coloring their fingernails with highlighters the other day (I just casually walked past, I’m not supposed to “discipline” the children, the actual teacher is supposed to be vaguely watching for troublemakers). I am alone with anywhere from 14 to 31 students for fourteen 45-minute classes per week. My kids range from 6-10 years old and some are brilliant, some not so brilliant. This system here is based heavily on structure, rules, and, in my opinion, negative reinforcement. Thus the children love me because I’m always saying some version of “good job”, “very good”, or “that’s awesome”. I can gesture and speak mostly English with the oldest kids but the youngest ones are a struggle. Even going over things for three or four classes in a row, they still can’t remember the basics like counting to 10 and English ABC’s. I need some creativity; I did buy a wizard hand puppet that “only speaks English” (he is appropriately named Wizard Eric ☺). I’m starting to figure it out and it’s becoming a little more fun each day.

Last weekend my two friends (Amy from NJ and Alex from Ottawa) and I were invited to our new friend’s home in Le Mans. It was such a beautiful little French house out in the suburban country surrounded by fields and about 10 minutes out of the city. Our friends Guillaume and Antione took us out for a truly French dinner (reservations for 9:45pm… I am practically dozing into my wine at this point) and then out with some of their friends. We had possibly the best meal I’ve ever had with Antione’s parents the next day. I feel comfortable saying it was six courses – pre-lunch wine and chips (they are weirdly obsessed with chips here), carrots and pickled beets (which was amusing because they asked us how to say beets in English and in French the word “bite” pronounced like beet is a significantly inappropriate sexual term so the parents are just holding in their laughter as my friends and I continue to repeat it for them), curried chicken, salad and cheese, prune sauce(!!!) and ice cream, and finally coffee and chocolate. I thought I might fall over. It was three hours long and I enjoyed every second of it.

Ahhh yes and the strikes. Oh the French love their strikes. The decision has been passed to raise the retirement age so we shall see what happens. So far Angers is pretty unaffected. There are naturally the high school children “protesting” (I think they probably just want to skip class) and I live in a prime location to watch them stomp through the streets. There were some high schoolers in Le Mans who burned down their school and everyone is hearing about the gas situation in Paris but those are more the extremes. Buses and trains are a little messed up but all in all it’s not so bad. Except garbage, which was not collected for about 10 days. That kind of stunk (haha, get it??). The article below sums it up just in case you’re interested.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130751913

This next week I have the first of my seven weeks of vacation. I’m headed to Mont St. Michel, Saint Malo, and Rennes, on a little tour of Bretagne with my friends from here plus my old roommate from Dijon, Nikki! Seven girls trekking through the French countryside sounds like a blast. I’ll take lots of pictures (and hopefully figure out how to load them on this blog).

A plus tard (loosely translated, talk to you later)!

Sara